It can be just about anything, but I'm thinking of a Zak S. blog post from awhile back ("D&D with Pornstars" fame). Here's the link if you want to read about his thoughts on starting a sandbox game (the advice is good for more than just that type of game) basically the gist is "make it awesome;" when you're presented with two choices to either make it boring and run-of-the-mill, or to drop an exciting, attention grabbing, hook right from the start, pick the latter over the former.

Example and Counter-examples:
Boring: You find yourself in a dimly lit tavern, in search of work.
Awesome: You find yourself in a dimly lit tavern in search of work ... when you hear a very loud crack, a boom and suddenly feel the floor fall out from beneath you. The tavern has fallen into a very deep sinkhole.

Boring: You've heard rumors of strange noises and strange lights outside of town and the local magistrate is offereing a reward for information or resolution of the mystery.
Awesome: You're standing around in town when suddenly a flash of emerald green light illuminates the night sky and a baleful shriek echoes across the valley. It comes from the direction of the old ring of standing stones just outside of the battlements.

Maybe my examples aren't exactly "awesome" but they should immediately force the players to act and get them moving and for me that's one of the most important elements in any RPG. As for making it "heroic," that doesn't feel like a requirement of the genre to me ... but the players will decide if they are "heroic" or not. It's not up to me to make them heroes.

Last edited by NAJones (5/19/2014 10:14 pm)

My thought is this: Don't look at the whole setting and wonder what you will do with it; rather, look at one little corner of the setting and imagine what might be happening there -- the conflicts, the pivotal NPCs, the agenda of those NPCs, local legends, rumors, hauntings, myths, opportunities to get rich, and so forth. All these things can make for the start of a decent campaign.

The campaign I currently play in started off with our group of neutral-to-evil types (anti-heroes) that were asked to investigate some attacks on outlying farms.  The village was a meager place with an inn and a general store and not much else; maybe 50 souls all together.  It turns out, there's a den of beast-men in the forest a few miles from town and they need killin'.  So we done kilt a bunch.  Unfortunately, our Necromancer scared the torch bearer we hired from the village and the young lad told his father, upon our return, that he saw us decapitating enemies, pocketing body parts, etc.  What's a necromancer to do?  We gotta git outta town for starters...

I guess my point is, start simple and let it take on a life of its own.

But still the question stands, how do you start things with 1st level characters while avoiding sending them to clear the rats in the basement?

I think one approach that seems to be very practical is to have characters at very low levels doing heroic things, while not being the Heroes of the day. Some crisis situation comes up and multiple tasks need to be taken care of. The task the PCs are getting may not be the most glorious, but it's still important and the elite veterans are tied up with other things. For the people of a village that gets saved by the PCs, the PCs will be much greater heroes than the people who defended the royal palace 20 miles away.
Related to that, the adventure starts out looking like something trivial that does not require the immediate intervention of experienced expert adventurers, but soon turns out to be actually quite important. And with no time to raise a large force of seasoned warriors as reinforcements, the party has to find a way to deal with the situation with what limited resources they have. This probably works best if the main threat is not a powerful creature. The opposition the PCs encounter is not a threat in itself, but an obstacle for the PCs, that gets in their way of doing what they have to do. Catching a messenger who is delivering the order for an assasination can be an easy fight, but still be of great significance.

I don't know. That feels a lot like randomly poking around in places because otherwise their would be no game. It's a bit too much of a stretch to me.

Yora wrote:

I don't know. That feels a lot like randomly poking around in places because otherwise their would be no game. It's a bit too much of a stretch to me.

It's not random if someone's offering a reward. Or if the players have decided that that's where the treasure is.

The happy coincidence of S&S (and of D&D in my experience) is that the places most likely to have the treasure that the players want their characters to get are *also* the places most likely to be the loci of horrid eldritch incantations that have crossed the nighted gulfs of space and time and dragged from realms of pure madness the hideous ultramondane energies of an uncaring and infinitely violent cosmos. When you get the gems out anyway, you win and get the chance to do it again later. When you die, you still get the chance to do it again later, but with a different haircut (or "character").

Blackadder23 wrote:

Humans are quick to find even the simplest and most abstract games immersive and epic as long as they feel challenged and care about the outcome, so why not concentrate on those aspects?

This makes a lot of sense. And that feeling of challenge scales up and down very quickly, from "let's get out of this room alive" to "let's put to rest the unquiet spirits of this ritually slaughtered town"--based on what the players come to find important in the course of play. Give them an environment rich with chances, and they'll figure out stuff to care about--often because it comes up while they're looking to get out of the room alive and with the gems.

Last edited by Handy Haversack (5/20/2014 1:00 pm)

Sometimes (IMC) it's the littlest things that matter. Take my session from two weeks ago. I had a skeleton crew (only 2 players!) but we had a great time. Both of the characters were thieves. They were charged with the duty of saving a man from death row. For supplies they were given two horses and a big cart full of hay, a keg of lamp oil, and two potions of invisibility. They went down to the execution, which doubles up with the local market of Khromarium. 'Watch a good hanging and then get your veggies right here!' Five prisoners were being marched to the gallows, and there there happened to be a huge crowd. Apparently, a nobleman's son was also being executed for treason, so the commoners wanted to see justice.

One of the two PCs (again, a thief) drank a potion of invisibility, just to tell the man they were to rescue that he was about to be saved. Meantime, the other thief stacked some bales of hay by a vendor's booth. It was drenched in lamp oil.  He also drenched one of their two horses in oil, which it protested to. He lit the hay and the horse on fire, after tossing a bottle of Greek fire at them. The horse went berserk (it actually killed a man), the hay went up, the guards were distracted. The invisible thief picked the manacle locks of the guy they were to rescue, and then made him drink the second potion of invisibility. They had earlier stuck a man--sized crate under some of the bales of their cart, so they had their invisible rescued man go into that, and once the commotion was over, they slipped away. They were interogated by guards looking for the missing prisoner, and the cart was searched, but to no avail. Not a single fight, and yet it felt action-packed.

So, it was early, and we decided to keep playing. They had finished their rescue mission. I fast-forwarded to six months later. Here is where I channeled a little Leiber. They had an apartment near the docks, and they had a couple of girls over, drinking, laughing, having fun. But they ran out of wine! So the two of them went out to score some more wine. As they returned, they saw the silhouettes of some men in up in their second storey apartment. They decided to keep walking, thinking the girls were in on some trap being set for them. Suddenly, one of the girls screamed, came bursting through the door, and feel two stories to her death. Except it was not how she'd died -- she'd been stabbed. Still they walked on and went to see their master at the thieves' guild. He agreed to send a few bully boys to check things out while they waited. The men came back, and they'd found the other girl, frightened to death, and a ransacked apartment. Apparently, the men were looking for the guys who lived there, and also evidence of something they'd done. They found it: Some paintings stolen from a previous adventure (The Lamia's Heart, my short adventure in AFS). How did they get caught? Simple. One of the players is playing a Hyperborean, and he met the description (there are not many in town, and they stand out!). Now they felt like they were in over their heads in a sort of "gang war" between rival guilds, so they decided to take the first ship out of town. Their master is sending them to Port Zangerios, but there will be a few stops along the way . . .

Everything I just typed was first level action. No fighting, but a lot of intrigue. Not really epic at all, but a lot of planning, plan executing, and excitement. Really, I just gave the bare-bones version of it all, but I'm just trying to give an idea of one way I run a low level affair. I might do another low-level affair as a simple dungeon crawl. Depends on my mood! Oh, and I had to put my kids to bed in the middle of the game, too.
 

Nice!  I can taste the sword and sorcery flavor (boot leather and lotus) all the way down here.

Ghul wrote:

Oh, and I had to put my kids to bed in the middle of the game, too.
 

The real adventure I'm sure!